Hi Miriam and all,
As I read this, I kept thinking how utterly thick we people have been. It
is depressing to read of our folly.
Charlie.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: 27 July 2015 21:17
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] God's Masterpiece or the Devil's Bad Joke?
The book is on Bookshare. I actually have it, but have not taken the time to
read it. But I will, at some point.
Miriam
God's Masterpiece or the Devil's Bad Joke?
Monday, 27 July 2015 00:00 By Eduardo Galeano, TomDispatch | Book Excerpt
The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano's history of
humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).
Origin of Freedom of Oppression
Opium was outlawed in China.
British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a
surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and
morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.
The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of
Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free
trade demanded war.
William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug
traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which
offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.
In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists,
including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable
environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of
freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free
trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion,
exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese
despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.
The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War
lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.
Our Lady of the Seas, Narco Queen
The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire.
But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous
centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs
came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.
Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China's closed doors. On board the
ships of the Royal Navy, Christ's missionaries joined the warriors of free
trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black
Africans, now filled with poison.
In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island
of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:
"Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade."
Here Lay China
Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of
waging war.
Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. "Barbarians" was what they
called the English and the few Europeans they met.
And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet
of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy
soldiers in formation with a single shell.
In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the
French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial
troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the
leftovers.
The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty's power, was in reality many
palaces, more than 200 residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens,
not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything:
furniture and drapes, jade sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold
clocks, diamond bracelets... All that survived was the library, plus a
telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China 70 years
before.
Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for
many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.
Lootie
Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the imperial palace, arrived in
Beijing on a litter carried by eight scarlet-liveried porters and escorted
by 400 horsemen. This Lord Elgin, son of the Lord Elgin who sold the
sculptures of the Parthenon to the British Museum, donated to that same
museum the entire palace library, which had been saved from the looting and
fire for that very reason. And soon in another palace, Buckingham, Queen
Victoria was presented with the gold and jade scepter of the vanquished
king, as well as the first Pekinese in Europe. The little dog was also part
of the booty. They named it "Lootie."
China was obliged to pay an immense sum in reparations to its executioners,
since incorporating it into the community of civilized nations had turned
out to be so expensive. Quickly, China became the principal market for opium
and the largest customer for Lancashire cloth.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chinese workshops produced
one-third of all the world's manufactures. At the end of the nineteenth
century, they produced 6%.
Then China was invaded by Japan. Conquest was not difficult. The country was
drugged and humiliated and ruined.
Natural Disasters
An empty desert of footsteps and voices, nothing but dust stirred by the
wind.
Many Chinese hang themselves, rather than killing to kill their hunger or
waiting for hunger to kill them.
In London, the British merchants who triumphed in the Opium War establish
the China Famine Relief Fund.
This charitable institution promises to evangelize the pagan nation via the
stomach: food sent by Jesus will rain from heaven.
In 1879, after three years without rain, the Chinese number 15 million
fewer.
Other Natural Disasters
In 1879, after three years without rain, the Indians number nine million
fewer.
It is the fault of nature:
"These are natural disasters," say those who know.
But in India during these atrocious years, the market is more punishing than
the drought.
Under the law of the market, freedom oppresses. Free trade, which obliges
you to sell, forbids you to eat.
India is a not a poorhouse, but a colonial plantation. The market rules.
Wise is the invisible hand, which makes and unmakes, and no one should dare
correct it.
The British government confines itself to helping a few of the moribund die
in work camps it calls "relief camps," and to demanding the taxes that the
peasants cannot pay. The peasants lose their lands, sold for a pittance, and
for a pittance they sell the hands that work it, while shortages send the
price of grain hoarded by merchants sky-high.
Exporters do a booming trade. Mountains of wheat and rice pile up on the
wharves of London and Liverpool. India, starving colony, does not eat, but
it feeds. The British eat the Indians' hunger.
On the market this merchandise called hunger is highly valued, since it
broadens investment opportunities, reduces the cost of production, and
raises the price of goods.
Natural Glories
Queen Victoria was the most enthusiastic admirer and the only reader of the
verses of Lord Lytton, her viceroy in India.
Moved by literary gratitude or patriotic fervor, the viceregal poet held an
enormous banquet in Victoria's honor when she was proclaimed empress. Lord
Lytton invited 70,000 guests to his palace in Delhi for seven days and seven
nights.
According to the Times, this was "the most colossal and expensive meal in
world history."
At the height of the drought, when fields baked by day and froze by night,
the viceroy arose at the banquet to read out an upbeat message from Queen
Victoria, who predicted for her Indian subjects "happiness, prosperity, and
welfare."
English journalist William Digby, who happened to be present, calculated
that about 100,000 Indians died of hunger during the seven days and seven
nights of the great feast.
Upstairs, Downstairs
In a slow and complicated ceremony marked by the back and forth of speeches,
presentation of insignia, and exchange of offerings, India's princes became
English gentlemen and swore loyalty to Queen Victoria. For these vassal
princes, the bartering of gifts was, according to well-informed sources, a
trading of bribes for tribute.
The numerous princes lived at the summit of the caste pyramid, a system
reproduced and perfected by British imperial power.
The empire did not need to divide to rule. Long-sacred social, racial, and
cultural divisions were history's bequest.
From 1872 on, the British census classified the population of India
according to caste. Imperial rule thus not only reaffirmed the legitimacy of
this national tradition, but also used it to organize an even more
stratified and rigid society. No policeman could have dreamed up a better
way to control the function and destiny of each person. The empire codified
hierarchies and servitudes, and forbade any and all from stepping out of
place.
Calloused Hands
The princes who served the British Crown lived in perpetual despair over the
scarcity of tigers in the jungle and the abundance of jealousy in the harem.
In the twentieth century, they still consoled themselves as best they could:
the maharaja of Bharatpur bought all the Rolls-Royces on the market in
London and used them for garbage collection;
the one from Junagadh had many dogs, each with his own room, servant, and
telephone;
the one from Alwar set fire to the racetrack when his pony lost a race;
the one from Kapurthala built an exact replica of the Palace of Versailles;
the one from Mysore built an exact replica of Windsor Palace;
the one from Gwalior bought a miniature gold and silver train that ran about
the palace dining room carrying salt and spices to his guests;
the cannons of the maharaja of Baroda were made of solid gold;
and for a paperweight the one from Hyderabad used a 184-carat diamond.
Darwin's Voyage
Young Charles Darwin did not know what to do with his life. His father
encouraged him thus:
"You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."
At the end of 1831, he left.
After five years navigating South America, the Galapagos, and other
far-flung realms, he returned to London. He brought with him three giant
tortoises, one of which died in the year 2007 in a zoo in Australia.
He came back a different man. Even his father noticed:
"Why the shape of his head is quite altered!"
He brought back more than tortoises. He brought questions. His head was
teeming with questions.
Darwin's Questions
Why does the wooly mammoth have a thick coat? Could the mammoth be an
elephant that found a way to stay warm when the ice age set in?
Why is the giraffe's neck so long? Could it be because over time it got
stretched in order to reach fruit high in the treetops?
Were the rabbits that run in the snow always white, or did they become white
to fool the foxes?
Why does the finch have a different beak depending on where it lives? Could
it be that their beaks adapted bit by bit to the environment through a long
evolutionary process, so they could crack open fruits, catch larvae, drink
nectar?
Does the incredibly long pistil of the orchid indicate that there are
butterflies nearby whose remarkably long tongues are as long as the pistil
that awaits them?
No doubt it was a thousand and one questions like these which, with the
passage of years and doubts and contradictions, became the pages of his
explosive book on the origin of the species and the evolution of life in the
world.
Blasphemous notion, intolerable lesson in humility: Darwin revealed that God
did not create the world in seven days, nor did He model us in His image and
likeness.
Such horrible news was not well received. Who did this fellow think he was
to correct the Bible?
Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, asked Darwin's readers:
"Are you descended from the apes on your grandfather's side or your
grandmother's?"
I'll Show You the World
Darwin liked to cite James Coleman's travel notes.
No one better described the fauna of the Indian Ocean,
the sky above flaming Vesuvius,
the glow of Arabian nights,
the color of the heat in Zanzibar,
the air in Ceylon, which is made of cinnamon,
the winter shadows of Edinburgh,
and the grayness of Russian jails.
Preceded by his white cane, Coleman went around the world, from tip to toe.
This traveler, who did so much to help us see, was blind.
"I see with my feet," he said.
Only Human
Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we
learned we emerged from Africa's jungle and that no stork ever carried us
from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost
identical to those of mice.
Now we can't tell if we are God's masterpiece or the devil's bad joke. We
puny humans:
exterminators of everything,
hunters of our own,
creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is
the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects
intact,
we, the only animals who invent machines,
the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,
the only ones who devour their own home,
the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them,
the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or
selling their fellow humans,
the only ones who kill for fun,
the only ones who torture,
the only ones who rape.
And also
the only ones who laugh,
the only ones who daydream,
the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,
the ones who find beauty in rubbish,
the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,
the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,
and who create words so that
neither reality nor memory will be mute.
This post is excerpted from Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone Copyright ©
2009 by Eduardo Galeano; translation copyright © 2009 by Mark Fried.
Published by Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Group, New York, N.Y.
Originally published in the Spanish language in 2008 by Siglo XXI Editores
(Spain and Mexico) and Ediciones del Chanchito (Uruguay). By permission of
Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City, and Lamy, N.M. All rights
reserved.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
EDUARDO GALEANO
Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), born in Montevideo, Uruguay, was an essayist,
journalist, historian and activist, as well as one of Latin America's most
beloved literary figures. Galeano's books include the trilogy Memory of
Fire; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; Walking Words; and Mirrors: Stories
of Almost Everyone. His last book, Children of the Days (Los híjos de los
días), was published in English in 2013. An outspoken critic of the
increasingly dehumanizing effects of globalization on modern society,
Galeano remained a passionate advocate for human rights and justice.
RELATED STORIES
Memories of Galeano's Fire: My Afternoon With the Late Uruguayan Writer
By Danny Postel, Pulse Media | Op-Ed
"Disposable Futures": Critique of Violence
By Henry A. Giroux, Brad Evans, City Lights Books | Book Excerpt
"Seminar on Critical Thought" Organized by the Zapatistas Draws More Than a
Thousand Participants in Chiapas
By Christy Rodgers, Upside Down World | News Analysis
________________________________________
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Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
God's Masterpiece or the Devil's Bad Joke?
Monday, 27 July 2015 00:00 By Eduardo Galeano, TomDispatch | Book Excerpt
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reference not valid.
The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano's history
of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).
Origin of Freedom of Oppression
Opium was outlawed in China.
British merchants smuggled it in from India. Their diligent efforts led to a
surge in the number of Chinese dependent on the mother of heroin and
morphine, who charmed them with false happiness and ruined their lives.
The smugglers were fed up with the hindrances they faced at the hands of
Chinese authorities. Developing the market required free trade, and free
trade demanded war.
William Jardine, a generous sort, was the most powerful of the drug
traffickers and vice president of the Medical Missionary Society, which
offered treatment to the victims of the opium he sold.
In London, Jardine hired a few influential writers and journalists,
including best-selling author Samuel Warren, to create a favorable
environment for war. These communications professionals ran the cause of
freedom high up the flagpole. Freedom of expression at the service of free
trade: pamphlets and articles rained down upon British public opinion,
exalting the sacrifice of the honest citizens who challenged Chinese
despotism, risking jail, torture, and death in that kingdom of cruelty.
The proper climate established, the storm was unleashed. The Opium War
lasted, with a few interruptions, from 1839 to 1860.
Our Lady of the Seas, Narco Queen
The sale of people had been the juiciest enterprise in the British Empire.
But happiness, as everyone knows, does not last. After three prosperous
centuries, the Crown had to pull out of the slave trade, and selling drugs
came to be the most lucrative source of imperial glory.
Queen Victoria was obliged to break down China's closed doors. On board the
ships of the Royal Navy, Christ's missionaries joined the warriors of free
trade. Behind them came the merchant fleet, boats that once carried black
Africans, now filled with poison.
In the first stage of the Opium War, the British Empire took over the island
of Hong Kong. The colorful governor, Sir John Bowring, declared:
"Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade."
Here Lay China
Outside its borders the Chinese traded little and were not in the habit of
waging war.
Merchants and warriors were looked down upon. "Barbarians" was what they
called the English and the few Europeans they met.
And so it was foretold. China had to fall, defeated by the deadliest fleet
of warships in the world, and by mortars that perforated a dozen enemy
soldiers in formation with a single shell.
In 1860, after razing ports and cities, the British, accompanied by the
French, entered Beijing, sacked the Summer Palace, and told their colonial
troops recruited in India and Senegal they could help themselves to the
leftovers.
The palace, center of the Manchu Dynasty's power, was in reality many
palaces, more than 200 residences and pagodas set among lakes and gardens,
not unlike paradise. The victors stole everything, absolutely everything:
furniture and drapes, jade sculptures, silk dresses, pearl necklaces, gold
clocks, diamond bracelets... All that survived was the library, plus a
telescope and a rifle that the king of England had given China 70 years
before.
Then they burned the looted buildings. Flames reddened the earth and sky for
many days and nights, and all that had been became nothing.
Lootie
Lord Elgin, who ordered the burning of the imperial palace, arrived in
Beijing on a litter carried by eight scarlet-liveried porters and escorted
by 400 horsemen. This Lord Elgin, son of the Lord Elgin who sold the
sculptures of the Parthenon to the British Museum, donated to that same
museum the entire palace library, which had been saved from the looting and
fire for that very reason. And soon in another palace, Buckingham, Queen
Victoria was presented with the gold and jade scepter of the vanquished
king, as well as the first Pekinese in Europe. The little dog was also part
of the booty. They named it "Lootie."
China was obliged to pay an immense sum in reparations to its executioners,
since incorporating it into the community of civilized nations had turned
out to be so expensive. Quickly, China became the principal market for opium
and the largest customer for Lancashire cloth.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Chinese workshops produced
one-third of all the world's manufactures. At the end of the nineteenth
century, they produced 6%.
Then China was invaded by Japan. Conquest was not difficult. The country was
drugged and humiliated and ruined.
Natural Disasters
An empty desert of footsteps and voices, nothing but dust stirred by the
wind.
Many Chinese hang themselves, rather than killing to kill their hunger or
waiting for hunger to kill them.
In London, the British merchants who triumphed in the Opium War establish
the China Famine Relief Fund.
This charitable institution promises to evangelize the pagan nation via the
stomach: food sent by Jesus will rain from heaven.
In 1879, after three years without rain, the Chinese number 15 million
fewer.
Other Natural Disasters
In 1879, after three years without rain, the Indians number nine million
fewer.
It is the fault of nature:
"These are natural disasters," say those who know.
But in India during these atrocious years, the market is more punishing than
the drought.
Under the law of the market, freedom oppresses. Free trade, which obliges
you to sell, forbids you to eat.
India is a not a poorhouse, but a colonial plantation. The market rules.
Wise is the invisible hand, which makes and unmakes, and no one should dare
correct it.
The British government confines itself to helping a few of the moribund die
in work camps it calls "relief camps," and to demanding the taxes that the
peasants cannot pay. The peasants lose their lands, sold for a pittance, and
for a pittance they sell the hands that work it, while shortages send the
price of grain hoarded by merchants sky-high.
Exporters do a booming trade. Mountains of wheat and rice pile up on the
wharves of London and Liverpool. India, starving colony, does not eat, but
it feeds. The British eat the Indians' hunger.
On the market this merchandise called hunger is highly valued, since it
broadens investment opportunities, reduces the cost of production, and
raises the price of goods.
Natural Glories
Queen Victoria was the most enthusiastic admirer and the only reader of the
verses of Lord Lytton, her viceroy in India.
Moved by literary gratitude or patriotic fervor, the viceregal poet held an
enormous banquet in Victoria's honor when she was proclaimed empress. Lord
Lytton invited 70,000 guests to his palace in Delhi for seven days and seven
nights.
According to the Times, this was "the most colossal and expensive meal in
world history."
At the height of the drought, when fields baked by day and froze by night,
the viceroy arose at the banquet to read out an upbeat message from Queen
Victoria, who predicted for her Indian subjects "happiness, prosperity, and
welfare."
English journalist William Digby, who happened to be present, calculated
that about 100,000 Indians died of hunger during the seven days and seven
nights of the great feast.
Upstairs, Downstairs
In a slow and complicated ceremony marked by the back and forth of speeches,
presentation of insignia, and exchange of offerings, India's princes became
English gentlemen and swore loyalty to Queen Victoria. For these vassal
princes, the bartering of gifts was, according to well-informed sources, a
trading of bribes for tribute.
The numerous princes lived at the summit of the caste pyramid, a system
reproduced and perfected by British imperial power.
The empire did not need to divide to rule. Long-sacred social, racial, and
cultural divisions were history's bequest.
From 1872 on, the British census classified the population of India
according to caste. Imperial rule thus not only reaffirmed the legitimacy of
this national tradition, but also used it to organize an even more
stratified and rigid society. No policeman could have dreamed up a better
way to control the function and destiny of each person. The empire codified
hierarchies and servitudes, and forbade any and all from stepping out of
place.
Calloused Hands
The princes who served the British Crown lived in perpetual despair over the
scarcity of tigers in the jungle and the abundance of jealousy in the harem.
In the twentieth century, they still consoled themselves as best they could:
the maharaja of Bharatpur bought all the Rolls-Royces on the market in
London and used them for garbage collection;
the one from Junagadh had many dogs, each with his own room, servant, and
telephone;
the one from Alwar set fire to the racetrack when his pony lost a race;
the one from Kapurthala built an exact replica of the Palace of Versailles;
the one from Mysore built an exact replica of Windsor Palace;
the one from Gwalior bought a miniature gold and silver train that ran about
the palace dining room carrying salt and spices to his guests;
the cannons of the maharaja of Baroda were made of solid gold;
and for a paperweight the one from Hyderabad used a 184-carat diamond.
Darwin's Voyage
Young Charles Darwin did not know what to do with his life. His father
encouraged him thus:
"You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."
At the end of 1831, he left.
After five years navigating South America, the Galapagos, and other
far-flung realms, he returned to London. He brought with him three giant
tortoises, one of which died in the year 2007 in a zoo in Australia.
He came back a different man. Even his father noticed:
"Why the shape of his head is quite altered!"
He brought back more than tortoises. He brought questions. His head was
teeming with questions.
Darwin's Questions
Why does the wooly mammoth have a thick coat? Could the mammoth be an
elephant that found a way to stay warm when the ice age set in?
Why is the giraffe's neck so long? Could it be because over time it got
stretched in order to reach fruit high in the treetops?
Were the rabbits that run in the snow always white, or did they become white
to fool the foxes?
Why does the finch have a different beak depending on where it lives? Could
it be that their beaks adapted bit by bit to the environment through a long
evolutionary process, so they could crack open fruits, catch larvae, drink
nectar?
Does the incredibly long pistil of the orchid indicate that there are
butterflies nearby whose remarkably long tongues are as long as the pistil
that awaits them?
No doubt it was a thousand and one questions like these which, with the
passage of years and doubts and contradictions, became the pages of his
explosive book on the origin of the species and the evolution of life in the
world.
Blasphemous notion, intolerable lesson in humility: Darwin revealed that God
did not create the world in seven days, nor did He model us in His image and
likeness.
Such horrible news was not well received. Who did this fellow think he was
to correct the Bible?
Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, asked Darwin's readers:
"Are you descended from the apes on your grandfather's side or your
grandmother's?"
I'll Show You the World
Darwin liked to cite James Coleman's travel notes.
No one better described the fauna of the Indian Ocean,
the sky above flaming Vesuvius,
the glow of Arabian nights,
the color of the heat in Zanzibar,
the air in Ceylon, which is made of cinnamon,
the winter shadows of Edinburgh,
and the grayness of Russian jails.
Preceded by his white cane, Coleman went around the world, from tip to toe.
This traveler, who did so much to help us see, was blind.
"I see with my feet," he said.
Only Human
Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we
learned we emerged from Africa's jungle and that no stork ever carried us
from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost
identical to those of mice.
Now we can't tell if we are God's masterpiece or the devil's bad joke. We
puny humans:
exterminators of everything,
hunters of our own,
creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is
the healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects
intact,
we, the only animals who invent machines,
the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,
the only ones who devour their own home,
the only ones who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them,
the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or
selling their fellow humans,
the only ones who kill for fun,
the only ones who torture,
the only ones who rape.
And also
the only ones who laugh,
the only ones who daydream,
the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,
the ones who find beauty in rubbish,
the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,
the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,
and who create words so that
neither reality nor memory will be mute.
This post is excerpted from Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone Copyright ©
2009 by Eduardo Galeano; translation copyright © 2009 by Mark Fried.
Published by Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Group, New York, N.Y.
Originally published in the Spanish language in 2008 by Siglo XXI Editores
(Spain and Mexico) and Ediciones del Chanchito (Uruguay). By permission of
Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City, and Lamy, N.M. All rights
reserved.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Eduardo Galeano
Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), born in Montevideo, Uruguay, was an essayist,
journalist, historian and activist, as well as one of Latin America's most
beloved literary figures. Galeano's books include the trilogy Memory of
Fire; The Book of Embraces; We Say No; Walking Words; and Mirrors: Stories
of Almost Everyone. His last book, Children of the Days (Los híjos de los
días), was published in English in 2013. An outspoken critic of the
increasingly dehumanizing effects of globalization on modern society,
Galeano remained a passionate advocate for human rights and justice.
Related Stories
Memories of Galeano's Fire: My Afternoon With the Late Uruguayan Writer
By Danny Postel, Pulse Media | Op-Ed"Disposable Futures": Critique of
Violence
By Henry A. Giroux, Brad Evans, City Lights Books | Book Excerpt"Seminar on
Critical Thought" Organized by the Zapatistas Draws More Than a Thousand
Participants in Chiapas
By Christy Rodgers, Upside Down World | News Analysis
Show Comments
